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What is
Java?

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

What is
Ruby?

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

What is
COBOL?

COBOL was one of the first programming languages to be standardised: the first COBOL standard was issued by ANSI in 1968. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.

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Reviews of Java, Ruby, and COBOL

kfretwell33

Simple to learn

November 11, 2016 09:26

I taught myself Ruby about a year ago. I had experience with HTML/CSS, MySQL, and a little bit of javascript and python but would consider this my first true programming language I became proficient in (later picked up Swift).

I started with a CodeAcademy course before working on my first Rails project. The language is easy to read and Rails is an amazing framework. The online community is fantastic, the documentation is amazing, and there is no shortage of Ruby Gems which allows you to quickly "cobble" together a new project.

Ease of Use
Documentation
Reliability
Support

How developers use Java vs Ruby vs COBOL

Pretty much everything - Java is reasonably fast, reasonably safe, and reasonably expressive. I wouldn't call it the best at any of those things. The real advantage to me is that the virtual machine is ubiquitous and many people can understand it. Since I have the most experience in this language, it's my tool of choice for most projects.

I've also been learning JavaFx so that I can build user interfaces without the web. I've started several single-page-application projects that worked, but felt like workarounds or hacks and would be better-served as self-contained applications.

Only thing worth noting here is that we saw some major issues with memory swapping on Heroku with Ruby 2.1.2. We weren’t the only ones. So we actually reverted back to 2.0.0. Here’s what happened: . We’re planning to upgrade to 2.1.4 once we’ve had time to test thoroughly.

When we are comparing Turing complete languages it's not about what compiles faster or to the cleanest machine code, it's about what the developer can think in and write faster, including the availability of libraries. A couple of times I wrote some ruby scripts for this project. I just like the language best for some things. Love the syntax.

Do I really need to explain? Well to me, the most appealing factor in Java besides the unbelievable community and vast array of available libraries, is just the amount of effort that has been put in the modern JVM. Decades of optimization and improvements have lead to a terrific piece of technology. I admire the people contributed to that.

We are primarily a Ruby shop; our main apps are running on Ruby + Rails, our Slack bot is written in Ruby and our smaller projects are on Sinatra. It makes it really easy for us to re-use code and switch between different projects since they are all on the same language.

Shouldn't surprise anyone, as minecraft is also java-based. Java is used for much more than just the plugins though. JCVortex (our API) is also served with vert.x (Java) and many of our team-internal tools also originated from java or are still java-applications.

bytelore.com makes extensive use of Java in its applications. We use Java due to its performance, community and the number of other projects built in the language. We have many projects and libraries built in Java.

Most of our services are written in Ruby. We started out as a Ruby shop, but we're slowly also moving some stuff to Go. We're using Go more and more these days, actually, including some backend services.

This is my main language in the stack. I mostly use it's JavaFX library to build GUIs... Though verbose, it gives me that programmer's feeling and confidence that what I am doing is gonna be a success.